An apology is an expression of regret at having hurt someone. But it is also the opposite: a formal defense of one’s actions or beliefs. The concept is afflicted with “fence sickness,” to borrow a symptom from Marni Ludwig: decisively indecisive, divided to the point of infirmity. Her “Apologizer” makes that autoimmunity visible, the sonnet’s indented center a damaged mirror. The effect is to render doubling contagious, from “chow chow” to “pompom.” The phrase where the poem fissures, “In the past,” is also repeated—but what could history signify, when invoked by a stutterer who never dies? Biologically impossible, a “year-round chrysanthemum” opens the metaphysical impasse of deathlessness. And yet: ciao, ciao, she takes her leave, quitting the room of the poem. After all, the root of apology is apo-, “away.” Is she rueful, this orphaned Persephone, or righteous?

Ludwig’s poems wince and flex with internecine ambivalence, the conundrums of a self with only “injury for company.” Rarely does she stop gnawing at Dickinson’s zero-sum question, “But since Myself—assault Me— / How have I peace / Except by subjugating / Consciousness?” Rapt and recursive as its title suggests, Pinwheel, Ludwig’s first book, is like “trapping lightning in a mason jar,” as she writes in a lyric announcing her death. Cosmic wrath—that erotic erratic—meets a modest modernity made in the U.S.A. Thieves and liars, anesthetists and familiar strangers, are the riffraff she runs with, weirdly beautiful. They haunt clinics and gardens and sinister ceremonies, where secrecy is the currency, along with greed, fear, blindness, shame—and a shameful lack thereof. Hers is a lush and dodgy world, where we are “happy / to be home, yes, but mostly no.”

Troubled that contemporary poetry fails to address how violence—particularly toward women—is too often an abject element of sexual relations in our society, Ludwig has turned to obliquely dramatizing social ills. At the same time, she wants to affirm that sex is central to our being. She believes, with humility and humor, that “we are primarily products / of the slutty parts of the mind” and that if the heart has reasons off-limits to reason, then the brain can also feel things, maybe even fuck. These are love poems, the hard way: they make alibis, concessions, mistakes, but rarely the rent. They straiten and tick, then sashay back, their sonic work to ricochet, to keep the crazy from coming unstuck. A lurid pallor hangs over their polished frame: hush like a rush of air before the glass has already cracked.

—Andrew Zawacki

 

Kerosene

When listening is a feeling as when in swallowing
studies the swallower shows she is an expert
 
on summer by painting watercolor hamburgers
on the ward she is dripping strawberry ice cream
 
and back pain promising to no longer be deranged
on the old subject of winter she is now fucking two
 
women how fun some of the pleasure and none
of the risk no more fear of white of not making
 
rent her new concerns will be historical and intact
as a lampshade she is on the third floor knitting
 
gloves for flowers which were not a good buffer
lick the ditches of her arms and touch her hair.
 
 
 
The Problem Museum

I am a woman in line, so I apologize.
To every man and his right hand,
to the violin and its coffin. Let me be
the first in my family to order
the surgery: dogs and eggs and eyes.
 
 
Lamb

The wish is to vanish. Always
there is the problem of not enough
 
horizon and then of sex as the means
of deflection. Desire can’t be located
 
only followed into a procession
of hands. I told you feeling
 
could fix a gesture to its source
but I was thin and I was lying.
 
 
 
The White Room
 
The trauma is now
inseparable from the body, a watery feeling
like inhaling the ocean or listening
for silence at the blue stem of a wrist.
I knew love once, he couldn’t make a living.
He liked music for the way it left itself
alone. In the aquarium I kiss
the glass I tell the audience they’re wonderful.
I am swimming the old hotel
of sleep’s inner lining.
 
 
Fence Sickness
 
I kissed the green vines of the dead,
 
believing the little noxzema light
left was a seizure imminent
 
and lavender. Stitcher of black
hammocks, bruiser of insteps,
 
perfectionism made me her
 
hobby, nose to knee to nest. 
I held my hand under a faucet.
 
I loved the rules for counting
& sleeping, singing birdie birdie
 
with my injury for company.
 
 
Tinnitus

I believe a mouth is death, the falsetto
implicit in the throat, and the eye too
 
is subtraction, and not its answer,
recognition. I strung a speaker
 
in a tree and heard a blood bird,
keyed and splendid. I looked
 
for trouble across the braided back
of an animal. I tied a blood bow.
 
I slept a tooth loose. I licked its wake,
I never knew you. Seeing was just
 
a series of traps, and your hands,
the concession that made this silence.
 
 
Apologizer
 
I was a year-round chrysanthemum. And always I denied birds
 
influenced flowering. I came home stammering to pluck the fruit trees
 
of my falling school, but that’s just the behavior of cultivators.
 
In the orchard I played pinochle, a game consisting entirely of devotion
 
to an ancestor. As in, my mother wore a fur to her beak seizure,
 
the same fancy gray as her eye.
 
In the past, dominants were treated
 
with a dwarfing compound. In the past, I hawked my neck.
 
If no pinch was planned, a day apology commenced,
 
but never for more than six continuous hours of swallowing.
 
Under glass, night temperatures heavy-bloomed: lush cutting
 
with its mouth left open to artificial light, black tongue
 
like a chow chow, moonlight spoon, pompom. I watched
 
an entire field cascade. I saw her dead one time I left the room.
 
 
 
Snow
 
Is it a lie or memory in the city
I don’t want the sky? I have suicide
 
to make me safe and when I am
a coward I look into milk and think finally
 
I have learned my sorries I am separate
from instinct, extracting music
 
into an alibi or sucking cock
on the parquet floor really I am appraising
 
the family photographs it is easy to take
a good look easy to kneel and be grateful
 
for abstraction which is luxury and remains
my first mistake.
 

Photographs: Kristine Morfogen